ad been. Georgina was capable of simply telling the truth;
and yet if she simply told the truth, it was a wonder that she had not
been simply packed off to Europe.

Benyon's ignorance of her pretexts is a proof that this rather
oddly-mated couple never arrived at perfect intimacy,--in spite of a
fact which remains to be related. He thought of this afterwards, and
thought how strange it was that he had not felt more at liberty to ask
her what she did for him, and how she did it, and how much she suffered
for him. She would probably not have admitted that she suffered at all,
and she had no wish to pose for a martyr. Benyon remembered this, as
I say, in the after years, when he tried to explain to himself certain
things which simply puzzled him; it came back to him with the vision,
already faded, of shabby cross-streets, straggling toward rivers, with
red sunsets, seen through a haze of dust, at the end; a vista through
which the figures of a young man and a girl slowly receded and
disappeared,--strolling side by side, with the relaxed pace of desultory
talk, but more closely linked as they passed into the distance, linked
by its at last appearing safe to them--in the Tenth Avenue--that the
young lady should take his arm. They were always approaching that
inferior thoroughfare; but he could scarcely have told you, in those
days, what else they were approaching. He had nothing in the world but
his pay, and he felt that this was rather a "mean" income to offer Miss
Gressie. Therefore he did n't put it forward; what he offered, instead,
was the expression--crude often, and almost boyishly extravagant--of a
delighted admiration of her beauty, the tenderest tones of his voice,
the softest assurances of his eye and the most insinuating pressure of
her hand at those moments when she consented to place it in his arm.
All this was an eloquence which, if necessary, might have been condensed
into a single sentence; but those few words were scarcely needful, when
it was as plain that he expected--in general--she would marry him, as it
was indefinite that he counted upon her for living on a few hundreds
a year. If she had been a different girl he might have asked her to
wait,--might have talked to her of the coming of better days, of his
prospective promotion, of its being wiser, perhaps, that he should leave
the navy and look about for a more lucrative career. With Georgina it
was difficult to go into such questions; she had no taste